Chapter 2. The History of Bolshevik Savagery

The 20th century was the bloodiest period in human history, with world wars, genocide, concentration camps, the development of chemical and nuclear weapons, bombings, guerilla wars, and terrorist activities unheard before. As a result of this savagery, the number of dead is estimated in the hundreds of millions.

Joseph Stalin: Murderer of 40 million people

Why was the last century so bloody? First, advancing technology led to the development of weapons much more lethal than earlier ones. But the second and most important reason was that ideologies caused these weapons to be employed with terrible cruelty. The 20th century saw the violent harvest of the various "isms" that were founded in the 19th.

Communism, the bloodiest of these "isms," is by far the cruelest and also the most widespread. The number murdered by Communist regimes or organizations in the past hundred years stands at roughly 120 million. Just for the sake of this ideology, these people were removed from their homes, worked to death in concentration camps, exiled to perish on the Siberian steppes, subjected to the horrible tortures in the most horrible prisons, executed by brainwashed Communist militants, strangled, had their throats cut, or starved to death in deliberately-created famines.

The savagery of this red terror began first in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It spread throughout the newly formed Soviet Union and from there, to eastern Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, some Latin American countries, Cuba and Africa.

Lenin's Bloody Revolution

Karl Marx never led any political party. He was only a theoretician who tried to cram all of human history into the context of the rules of dialectical materialism. From his point of view, he interpreted the past and made predictions about the future, of which the greatest prediction was global revolution. He promised that the workers would destroy the capitalist system, after which a classless society would result.

In decades that passed since Marx's death in 1883, the revolution he'd announced so confidently never took place. In the capitalist countries of Europe, workers' living and working conditions improved, however slightly, abating the tension between the workers and the bourgeoisie. The revolution wasn't happening, and it wasn't going to happen.

In the early 1900s, another important name appeared in Russia. Vladimir Ilich Lenin was gradually rising to prominence in Russia's Social Democratic Party, which Marxists had founded. Lenin gave Marxism a whole new interpretation. In his view, the revolution couldn't happen spontaneously, because the European working class had been sedated by what the bourgeoisie had offered them and in any other countries was no working class worth mentioning. To this problem, Lenin offered a militant solution: Marx's predicted revolution wouldn't be carried out by the workers (the proletariat, in Marxist literature), but by surrogates—a Communist Party of professional revolutionaries with military training, acting on the workers' behalf. By using armed intervention and propaganda, "the Communist Party" would bring about a political revolution. From the moment their authoritarian regime seized power, it would establish what Lenin called the "dictatorship of the proletariat." It would clear away opposition, abolish private property, and ensure society's advancement towards a Communist order.

Above: After Marx's death, Lenin interpreted his ideology, trying to fill the lacunae and reconcile the contradictions Marx had left. In so doing, Lenin produced the formula for bringing Communism to power by force of arms. The photograph above, taken in 1897 in St. Petersburg, shows Lenin (middle) with other Communist militants. Below: A Russian edition of Marx's Das Kapital.

With Lenin's theory, Communism would become the ideology of a group of armed terrorists. After him, hundreds of Communist Parties (or workers' parties devoted to bloody revolution) sprouted throughout the world.

Lenin speaking to a crowd in Red Square, 1919.

What methods did the Communist Party intend for its revolution? Lenin answered this in both his writings and his actions: The Party would shed as much blood as possible. In 1906, eleven years before the Bolshevik Revolution, he wrote in Proletary magazine:

The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organizations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any revolutionary organization. Armed struggle pursues two different aims, which must be strictly distinguished: in the first place, this struggle aims at assassinating individuals, chiefs and subordinates in the Army and police; in the second place, it aims at the confiscation of monetary funds both from the government and from private persons. The confiscated funds go partly into the treasury of the party, partly for the special purpose of arming and preparing for an uprising, and partly for the maintenance of persons engaged in the struggle we are describing. The big expropriations (such as the Caucasian, involving over 200,000 rubles, and the Moscow, involving 875,000 rubles) went in fact first and foremost to revolutionary parties — small expropriations go mostly, and sometimes entirely, to the maintenance of the "expropriators".14

Bolshevik revolutionaries posing with their weapons in St. Petersburg, November 1917

At the beginning of the 1900's, an important divergence of ideas occurred in the Russian Social Democratic Party. The group led by Lenin supported revolution by violence; while another group wanted to bring Marxism to Russia by more democratic means. The Leninists, though small in numbers, used various methods of pressure to gain the majority and became known as the Bolsheviks, the Russian word for majority. The other group was called the Mensheviks, which means minority.

The Bolsheviks began to organize following the way Lenin had outlined, through such methods as assassinations, confiscation of government money, and robbing official institutions. After many years of banishment, the Bolsheviks began their Russian Revolution of 1917. Actually, that year saw two separate revolutions. The first came in February; when Tsar Nicholas II was removed from the throne and imprisoned with his family, and a democratic government was established. But the Bolsheviks didn't want democracy; they were determined to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.

In October 1917, their awaited revolution took place. Communist militants led by Lenin and Trotsky, his chief assistant, seized first the former capital, Petrograd ("Peter City," named for Peter the Great), and then Moscow. Battles in these two cities established the world's first Communist regime.

Above, Lenin with a group of Bolshevik militants in 1918. In telegraphs he sent to Communist militants in all parts of the country, Lenin gave constant orders for executions, to be carried out in a way as to spread fear among the people.

After the October Revolution, Russia was swept by a three-year civil war war between the so-called White Army, assembled by Tsarist generals, and the Red Army led by Trotsky. In July of 1918, Lenin ordered Bolshevik militants to execute Tsar Nicholas II and his family, including his three children. In the course of the civil war, the Bolsheviks did not hesitate to commit the bloodiest crimes, murders, and tortures against their opponents.

Both the Red Army and the Cheka, a secret police organization founded by Lenin, inflicted terror on all parts of society opposed to the revolution. A book entitled The Black Book of Communism written by a group of scholars andpublished by the Harvard University Press, describing Communist atrocities throughout the world, has this to say about Bolshevik terror:

The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power. This strategy applied not only to groups with opposing political views, but also to such social groups as the nobility, the middle class, the intelligentsia, and the clergy, as well as professional groups such as military officers and the police. Sometimes the Bolsheviks subjected these people to genocide. The policy of "de-Cossackization" begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our definition of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory, the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non-Cossack occupants. Lenin commpared the Cossacks to the Vendée during the French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a program of what Gracchus Babeuf, the "inventor" of modern Communism, characterized in 1795 as "populicide."15

Ignorant militants of Communism

The Bolsheviks, ignorant to the masses and an intensive propaganda, simple slogans shouted into the ranks as soon as possible, adding that many people. Uneducated and poor people, promising them peace of bread and easily inanabiliyorlardi communist lies. Spurred by Darwinism, atheism, however, were reinforced by communist propaganda. In the picture, as a result of such propaganda is communist in a few days, a group of Russian workers and peasants is located..

In every city they entered, the Bolsheviks killed those not open to their ideology and committed acts of excessive savagery intended to instill fear. The Black Book of Communism describes the Bolshevik atrocities in Crimea:

Leon Trotsky, military leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and the second most important man after Lenin. As leader of the Red Army, he led all of Russia into a bloody civil war. At the top, we see a view of the tens of thousands of innocents killed in the civil war.

Similar acts of violence occurred in most of the cities of the Crimea occupied by the Bolsheviks, including Sevastopol, Yalta, Alushta, and Simferopol. Similar atrocities are recorded from April and May 1918 in the big Cossack cities then in revolt. The extremely precise file of the Denikin commission record "corpses with hands cut off, broken bones, heads ripped off, broken jaws, and genital removed."16

The Russian historian and socialist S.P. Melgunov, in his book The Red Terror in Russia, says that Sevastopol was turned into a "city of the hanged" because of the extermination campaign against surviving witnesses:

From Nakhimovksky, all one could see was the hanging bodies of officers, soldiers, and civilians arrested in the streets. The town was dead, and the only people left alive were hiding in lofts or basements. All the walls, shop fronts, and telegraph poles were covered with posters calling for "Death to the traitors." They were hanging people for fun.17

The Bolsheviks sorted the people they wanted to eliminate into certain categories. For example, the bourgeoisie (or the "Mensheviks," who understood socialism differently from the Bolsheviks) were the new regime's chief enemies. The "kulak," the most numerous category, was specially targeted. In Russian, a kulak is the name given to a rich landowner. During the revolution and the civil war, Lenin issued hundreds of orders that rained pitiless terror on the kulaks. For example, in one telegram to the Central Executive Committee of Penza soviet, he said:

A propaganda poster showing Trotsky as a war hero.

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand such actions, for the final struggle with the kulaks has now begun. You must make an example of these people. Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known blood-suckers. Publish their names. Seize all their grain…Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble…Reply saying you have received and carried out these instructions. Yours, Lenin.18

Lenin gave many orders like this one. Bolshevik militants gladly carried out his instructions, even inventing their own styles of savagery. The famous author Maxim Gorky witnessed some of these methods and later wrote:

Maxim Gorky

In Tambov province Communists were nailed with railway spikes by their left hand and left foot to trees a metre above the soil, and they watched the torments of these deliberately oddly-crucified people. They would open a prisoner's belly, take out the small intestine and nailing it to a tree or telegraph pole they drove the man around the tree with blows, watching the intestine unwind through the wound. Stripping a captured officer naked, they tore strips of skin from his shoulders in the form of shoulder straps...19

The Bolsheviks undertook to exterminate those who did not want to adopt Communism. Tens of thousands were executed without a trial. Many opponents of the regime were sent to concentration camps, collectively called the "Gulag," where prisoners were worked almost to death under very harsh conditions. Many never left these camps alive. In the period from 1918 to 1922, they murdered hundreds of thousands of workers and villagers who had opposed the regime.

The Harvard historian Richard Pipes investigated secret Soviet archives to research his book, The Unknown Lenin. Revealing that Lenin gave countless orders to have people tortured and murdered, he ends his book with this evaluation:

With the evidence currently available it becomes difficult to deny that Lenin was, not an idealist, but a mass murderer, a man who believed that the best way to solve problems—no matter whether real or imaginary—was to kill off the people who caused them. It is he who originated the practice of political and social extermination that in the twentieth century would claim tens of millions of lives.20

Russian soldiers supporting an uprising instigated by Trotsky against the Tsar in St. Petersburg, 1917.

Pavlov's Dogs and Lenin's Plans for Human Evolution

Ivan Pavlov, known for his conditioned reflex experiments performed on animals.

It's important to understand the reason behind Lenin's violence and that underlay further examples of Communist tragedies. Why did Lenin and other Communist leaders we'll examine later—Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot—become crazed murderers?

The reason is the materialist philosophy they held, and its view of human beings. As we saw at the beginning, Communism is basically materialist philosophy applied to history, in total harmony with Darwin's theory of evolution—which, in turn, is the adaptation of materialist philosophy to the natural world. Some basic elements of this perverse philosophy can be outlined as follows:

1. A human being is composed only of matter, with no spirit or soul.

2. A human is a highly evolved species of animal. Essentially, there is no difference between human beings and animals. The only difference between a human being and other animals is that his environment has tamed him.

3. In nature and in human society, the only unchanging law is the one of conflict. Conflicting interests result in struggle. At the end of any struggle, it is natural—even necessary—that one side lose, suffer and die.

4. Therefore, from the Communist point of view, for any development to take place—for example, for the "revolution" to succeed—it's inevitable, even necessary, that many people will suffer, be subjected to torture, and die.

5. To legitimize these convictions, Communism—and every other ideology that adopts a materialist philosophy—resorts to destroying a society's faith in God. Actually, the aim of materialism is to alienate society from its belief in God and in religious and moral values, and bring into being a mass of human beings who consider themselves an assortment of soulless animals. In this way, these ideologues believe that they can control the masses, establish their own power, and prepare a legitimate foundation for any immorality or cruelty they wish to commit.

Given that Communism regards human being in this way, it follows that its major efforts have been towards "bestializing" them—beating them like wild animals, "training" them by instilling fear and inflicting pain and, when necessary, cutting their throats.

Very clearly, Lenin accepted this materialist-Darwinist philosophy that regards human beings as animals. After speaking privately with Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the Russian scientist famous for his experiments on the conditioned reflexes of animals, Lenin tried applying Pavlov's methods to Russian society. In his book, A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution, Orlando Figes writes about Lenin's desire to "educate" the Russian people as an animal trainer would, and how the roots of this ambition lie in Darwinism:

In October 1919, according to legend, Lenin paid a secret visit to the laboratory of the great physiologist I. P. Pavlov to find out if his work on the conditional reflexes of the brain might help the Bolsheviks control human behaviour. 'I want the masses of Russia to follow a Communistic pattern of thinking and reacting,' Lenin explained… Pavlov was astounded.

It seemed that Lenin wanted him to do for humans what he had already done for dogs.

'Do you mean that you would like to standardize the population of Russia? Make them all behave in the same way?' he asked. 'Exactly' replied Lenin. 'Man can be corrected. Man can be made what we want him to be.'… [T]he ultimate aim of the Communist system was the transformation of human nature. It was an aim shared by the other so-called totalitarian regimes of the inter-war period…As one of the pioneers of the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany put in 1920, 'it could almost seem as if we have witnessed a change in the concept of humanity…We were forced by the terrible exigencies of war to ascribe a different value to the life of the individual than was the case before.'

...The notion of creating a new type of man through the enlightenment of the masses had always been the messianic mission of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, from whom the Bolsheviks emerged. Marxist philosophy likewise taught that human nature was a product of historical development and could thus be transformed by a revolution. The scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley, which had the status of a religion among the Russian intelligentsia during Lenin's youth, equally lent itself to the view that man was determined by the world in which he lived. Thus the Bolsheviks were led to conclude that their revolution, with the help of science, could create a new type of man...

Conditional Reflex Indoctrination

Trotsky gives a propaganda speech to a mass crowd in Red Square in 1918. Lenin and Trotsky believed they could train human beings like animals, using methods to evoking a conditioned response. The Soviet Union organized the Communist Party according to this logic.

...Although Pavlov was an outspoken critic of the revolution and had often threatened to emigrate, he was patronized by the Bolsheviks. After two years of growing his own carrots, Pavlov was awarded a handsome ration and a spacious Moscow apartment... Lenin spoke of Pavlov's work as 'hugely significant' for the revolution. Bukharin called it 'a weapon from the iron arsenal of materialism.'21

Trotsky, an important theoretician of Communist ideology and Lenin's most important associate, agreed with Lenin's views about "the transformation of human nature" that had their origin in Darwinism. As Trotsky wrote:

What is man? He is by no means a finished or harmonious being. No, he is still a highly awkward creature. Man, as an animal, has not evolved by plan but spontaneously, and has accumulated many contradictions. The question of how to educate and regulate, of how to improve and complete the physical and spiritual construction of man, is a colossal problem which can only be conceived on the basis of Socialism. We can construct a railway across the Sahara, we can build the Eiffel Tower and talk directly with New York, but we surely cannot improve man. No, we can! To produce a new, 'improved version' of man — that is the future task of Communism…Man must look at himself and see himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and say: 'At last, my dear homo sapiens, I will work on you.'22

Along with Lenin and Trotsky, other Bolsheviks believed that human beings were an animal species, nothing more than an agglomeration of matter. Because they saw no value in human life, millions of persons could easily be sacrificed for the sake of the revolution. According to Richard Pipes's The Unknown Lenin, "For humankind at large Lenin had nothing but scorn:the documents confirm Gorky's assertion that individual human beings held for Lenin 'almost no interest,' and that he treated the working class much as a metalworker treated iron ore." 23

Lenin's Policy of Deliberate Starvation

As a result of his commitment of Darwinism, Lenin regarded human beings as a herd of animals and he did not hesitate to use the cruelest methods against them.

Nearly all Communist regimes of the 20th century have subjected their peoples to starvation. In Lenin's time, famine brought death to five million. From 1932 to 1933, in Stalin's time, the same disaster happened again but with a much wider scope; more than 6 million people died as a result of it.As we will see in the following pages, millions died as a result of famine in Mao's Red China and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

Today, with supermarkets, bakeries, pastry shops, and restaurants all around us; famine seems an alien concept. When we do hear about famine, most often we think of it as a period of temporary hunger. But the famines in Russia, China and Cambodia was a prolonged condition that lasted for months, even years. Apart from grain and rice that villagers could grow to feed themselves, all produce was snatched from their hands, leaving them nothing else to eat. People ate all the vegetables and fruit that they used to collect for sale, and all the animals they could slaughter. When this supply quickly ran out, they would resort to boiling leaves, grass and tree bark. After several weeks of continual hunger, their bodies would grow weak and become emaciated. Some would eat stray cats and dogs and other wild creatures, including insects. Soon, wracked with pain, people would start to die, one after another, with no one to bury them. Finally would appear famine's worst aspect of all: cannibalism. People would start to eat corpses first, then attack each other, snatching children to slaughter and devour. In line with Communist philosophy, they would become bestialized indeed, and human no longer.

This was the goal of the Communist regime. Unbelievable as it might seem, it happened first in the 20th century, in Bolshevik Russia under Lenin's leadership.

In 1921 and 1922, as a result of the famine deliberately caused by Lenin, 29 million people within the borders of the Soviet Union were caught in the grips of starvation. Five million of them starved to death.

In 1918, shortly after the Bolsheviks came to power, Lenin decided to abolish private property. His decision's most important result was the nationalization of land once owned by villagers. Bolshevik militants, Cheka police agents, and Red Army units forced their way into farms all over Russia and, under threat of arms, confiscated the produce that was the only source of food for villagers already living in harsh conditions. A quota was established that every farmer had to give to the Bolsheviks, but in order to fill it, most farmers had to surrender all the produce they had. Villagers who resisted were silenced by the most brutal methods.

In order to have not all their wheat seized, some farmers hid a portion in storage. The Bolsheviks regarded this kind of behavior as a "betrayal of the revolution" and punished it with incredible savagery. On February 14, 1922, an inspector went to the region of Omsk and described what happened there:

Abuses of position by the requisitioning detachments, frankly speaking, have now reached unbelievable levels. Systematically, the peasants who are arrested are all locked up in big unheated barns; they are then whipped and threatened with execution. Those who have not filled the whole of their quota are bound and forced to run naked all along the main street of the village and then locked up in another unheated hangar. A great number of women have been beaten until they are unconscious and then thrown naked into holes dug in the snow…24

Cannibals Caught Eating A Kidnapped Child

In the course of the famine that Lenin regarded as "beneficial," cases of cannibalism were discovered. This photograph, taken in a Russian village in the Volga region in 1921, shows two adults eating children they had kidnapped and butchered. This scene of savagery is evidence of the model ommunism seeks to establish.

Lenin became enraged when he saw that quotas set for the villagers were not being met. Finally in 1920, he imposed a terrible punishment on the villagers in some areas who were resisting the confiscations: These villagers would have not only their produce taken, but their seeds as well. This meant they couldn't plant new crops and would certainly die of hunger. From 1921 to 1922, famine caught 29 million Russian individuals in its grip; and five million of them died.

While the were dying of hunger ...

The famine at the beginning of the 1920's resulted from the Bolsheviks confiscating the peasants' crops. Millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of children, died in the famine. Lenin told his comrades this famine was very beneficial, because "it would destroy faith in God".

When news of the famine reached Western countries, they organized an aid campaign to help ease the disaster. It almost succeeded, but it came too late. The Bolsheviks, wanting to conceal the utter disaster of their agricultural policy, forbade the publication of any news about the famine, consistently denying that it was happening. In his book, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes writes:

... The red army was plundering their grain

Children became just skin and bone and died of starvation, but the Bolsheviks continued to confiscate the peasants' grain. Sacks that peasants hid underground were found and dragged out of their holes by Communist militants. Villagers who had hidden the sacks were tortured to death. In the Kurgan region in 1918,bags of wheat were forcibly collected from the people to feed the Red Army.

In the spring of 1921, peasants in the areas struck by the famine resorted to eating grass, tree bark, and rodents... There were confirmed cases of cannibalism. Soon millions of wretched human beings abondoned their villages and headed for the nearest railroad station hoping to make their way to regions where, rumor had it, there was food. They clogged the railway depots, for they were refused transportation, because until July 1921 Moscow persisted in denying that a catastrophe had occurred. Here, in the words of a contemporary, they waited "for trains which never came, or for death, which was inevitable." Visitors to the stricken areas passed village after village with no sign of life, the inhabitants having either departed or lying prostrate in their cottages, too weak to move. In the cities, corpses littered the streets...25

What was the aim of this policy? Lenin wanted to strengthen the Bolshevik regime's economy by seizing villagers' produce and realize the Communist dream of abolishing private property. But in deliberately subjecting his fellow Russians to famine, Lenin also had another purpose: Hunger, he knew, would have a devastating effect on their morale and psychology. He wanted to use famine as a tool to destroy people's faith in God and instigate a movement against the church. The Black Book of Communism describes Lenin's state of mind:

A photograph of Lenin, shortly before his death..

A young lawyer called Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov was then living in Samara, the regional capital of one of the areas worst affected by the famine. He was the only member of the local intelligentsia who not only refused to participate in the aid for the hungry, but publicly opposed it. As one of his friends later recalled, "Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results, particularly in the appearance of a new industrial proletariat, which would take over from the bourgeoisie…Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy, would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the stage that necessarily followed capitalism. Famine would also destroy faith not only in the tsar, but in God too."

Thirty years later, when the "young lawyer" had become the head of the Bolshevik government, his ideas remained unchanged: Famine could and should "strike a mortal blow against the enemy." The enemy in question was the Orthodox Church.26

A letter Lenin sent to members of the Politburo on March 19, 1922, shows he wanted to use hunger as a method to break the bond between religion and the masses, to numb their reactions and thus facilitate his planned assault against religious institutions:

Lenin's end is a lesson for all

Before he died, Lenin became mad. This photograph, taken shortly before his death, teaches an example of the torment God sends in this world upon leaders of irreligion. This end is announced in Verse 30:10 of the Qur'an: "Then the final fate of those who did evil will be the Worst because they denied God's Signs and mocked at them."

In fact the present moment favors us far more than it does them. We are almost 99 percent sure that we can strike a mortal blow against them [our enemies] and consolidate the central position that we are going to need to occupy for several decades to come. With the help of all those starving people who are starting to eat each other, who are dying by the millions, and whose bodies litter the roadside all over the country, it is now and only now that we can—and therefore must—confiscate all church property with all the ruthless energy we can still muster… All evidence suggests that we could not do this at any other moment, because our only hope is the despair engendered in the masses by the famine, which will cause them to look at us in a favorable light or, at the very least, with indifference.27

Lenin's cruel methods are the first instance of Communist savagery. Stalin and Mao, the dictators who came after him, only increased the scope of the horror.

Lenin's own death is quite telling. He suffered his first stroke in May 1922. On December 16, 1922, he suffered another major attack. Half paralyzed, he was confined to bed. In March of 1923, his illness worsened significantly and he lost the ability to speak. Afflicted by terrible headaches, he spent most of 1923 in a wheelchair. In the final months of his life, those who saw him were horrified at the frightful, half-mad expression on his face. He died of a brain hemorrhage on January 21, 1924.

The Bolsheviks mummified Lenin's body and specially preserved his brain, which they considered to have great value. They placed his body in a tomb, built in the style of a Greek temple, in Moscow's Red Square, where it was visited by crowds of people. Lines of visitors would look at the corpse in dread.

Their dread was to increase in years to come. Joseph Stalin, Lenin's successor, was even more cruel and sadistic. In a short time, he established the greatest "reign of terror" in modern history.

Lenin's body was mummified like an Egyptian pharaoh's and placed in a tomb reminiscent of a Greek temple.

How Did Stalin Become a Communist?

Stalin was brought up to be a priest, but at a young age was drawn into atheism by some books he read, the most influential of which was Darwin's Origin of Species..

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was born in 1879, in a poor family in Gori, a small town near Tbilisi in Georgia. He began to use the name of Stalin, which means "man of steel" in Russian, after 1913.

His mother was a religious woman. She she used all her strength to rear her son to be a priest, so she enrolled him in a church school in Gori. He graduated after five years there, and entered the seminary in Tblisi to begin his studies to become a priest of the Georgian Orthodox Church.

During this period, however, Stalin read a few books that changed his world view. Up to then, he had been the devout son of a religious mother, but he lost his faith in God and religion and became an atheist after reading Darwin's The Origin of Species.

In his book, Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union, the Oxford University historian Alex de Jonge shows Darwin's vital role in shaping Stalin's youthful outlook. According to Jonge, he was "a theological student who had lost his faith; Stalin would always maintain that it was Darwin who was responsible for that loss."28 Stalin's adoption of Marxism happened not long afterward. Jonge states that Stalin often emphasized this point in his private conversations.

In his book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, the English historian Alan Bullock compares these two men, saying that, in his youth, Stalin was very influenced by the works of Karl Marx and Auguste Comte, which he read in Russian translations.29

Actually, this deception happened not only to Stalin, but to the majority of a generation of Russian students and other young people. The myths in scientific garb proposed by Darwin, Huxley, and Lamarck led many young Russians to become atheists. In A People's Tragedy, A history of the Russian Revolution, historian Orlando Figes says, "The scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley ... had the status of a religion among the Russian intelligentsia during Lenin's youth."30 Figes relates how Semen Kanatchikov, a young worker who later joined the Bolsheviks, abandoned his religion as the result of evolutionist propaganda:

After Stalin had joined the ranks of the Communists, he was arrested several times under the Tsar's regime. At left, a series of photographs of one of those arrests.

One young worker "proved" to him that God had not created man by showing that, if one filled a box with earth and kept it warm, worms and insects would eventually appear in it. This sort of vulgarized pre-Darwinian science, which was widely found in the left-wing pamphlets of that time, had a tremendous impact on young workers like Kanatchikov… "Now my emancipation from my old prejudices moved forward at an accelerated tempo," later he wrote. "I stopped going to the priest for confession, no longer attended church, and began to eat 'forbidden' food."31

Stalin became close to Lenin in his latter days and tried to advance within the party. Upon Lenin's death, Stalin overcame his rivals and became the Soviet Union's sole ruler..

Such examples as the one quoted above, used to support the claim that God did not create life and that everything came to be by chance, were sheer bogus. Worms and insects did not arise by happenstance—out of nothing, as the medieval belief in spontaneous generation had it—but from eggs laid in the ground. But because the scientific world was not yet aware that living creatures could never be generated from lifeless matter, such myths as these arose like a flood, drowning the half-ignorant Russian youth in atheism.

Members of the atheist generation that grew up in Russia in the 19th century, emerged in the 20th century as passionate Communists. One of them was Stalin. In 1898 he joined a secret Communist organization and began to write for a Communist magazine, Brdzola (The Struggle), in 1901. By 1917, he was an active militant of the Communist movement led by Lenin. After the October Revolution of 1917, he became one of the five members of the Politburo, the highest degree of membership in the Communist Party. While Lenin lay ill in 1923, Stalin's power continued in the party to grow and upon Lenin's death, he became the supreme authority. In the five years between 1924 and 1929, he cleared the party of all his opponents by assassination, execution, or exile. Even Trotsky, one of the architects of the October Revolution, became the object of his rage and was driven out of the Soviet Union.

After consolidating his power, Stalin turned his iron fist on society. Lenin had tried to nationalize all the agricultural land in Russia, but the devastation caused by the great famine of 1920-1921 forced him to postpone this undertaking. Stalin, determined to put his plan into effect, began to apply a policy called "collectivization." Its aim was to nationalize all of the villagers' property, seize and export their crops, and use the revenue to bolster Soviet industry and strengthen the military.

Stalin carried out his collectivization policy by torture, murder and starvation. Six million people died of famine, while he exported hundreds of thousands of tons of grain. Once again, Stalin documented the savagery of Materialist-Darwinist ideas, which regarded humanity as an animal species that had to be trained by inflicting pain as corrective punishment.

The Savagery of Collectivization

Peasants in Ukraine in 1929 listening to collectivization propaganda. Collectivization was presented as a way to increase agricultural yield, but its implementation caused a terrible famine.

This policy of Stalin's began in 1929. According to his plan, all private property was to be abolished. Every villager would have to give to the state a certain quota of his production and was prohibited from selling his own produce. The villagers' quotas were very high and to meet it, most had to surrender everything they had. The tyranny Lenin had begun in the 1920's resumed once more.

To implement collectivization, Stalin employed the cruelest methods. Those who resisted were killed, exiled to Siberia (essentially, murder over the long term) or left to starve (slow murder). Throughout the whole country, kulaks (rich landowners) who resisted collectivization—and, therefore, Communism in general—were hunted down. The Black Book of Communism describes this policy:

The kulaks who resisted collectivization were shot, and the others were deported with their wives, children and elderly family members. Although not all kulaks were exterminated directly, sentences of forced labor in wilderness areas of Siberia or the far north left them with scant chance of survival. Several tens of thousands perished there; the exact number of victims remains unknown. As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, which resulted from the rural population's resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months.32

The savagery inflicted on the kulaks included the most horrendous tortures. In a letter to Stalin in April 1933, the writer Mikhail Sholokhov wrote:

In the Napolovski kolkhoz [a collective farm in the Soviet Union] a certain Plotkin, plenipotentiary for the district committee, forced the collective workers to stretch out on stoves heated till they were white hot; then he cooled them off by leaving them naked in a hangar. 33

Stalin's regime, like Lenin's before it, created imaginary enemies they called "kulaks." They targeted anyone they wanted to eliminate by stamping them with this name. It was easy for the Communists to categorize those they didn't like as "kulaks" and to send orders to every city, commanding that a certain number of these "kulaks" be rounded and executed. This is described in The Black Book of Communism:

In such conditions, it is not surprising that in certain districts between 80 and 90 percent of those victimized by the dekulakization process were serednyaki, or middle-income peasants. The brigades had to meet the required quotas and, if possible, surpass them. Peasants were arrested and deported for having sold grain on the market or for having had an employee to help with the harvest back in 1925 or 1926, for possessing two samovars, for having killed a pig in September 1929 "with the intention of consuming it themselves and thus keeping it from socialist appropriation." Peasants were arrested on the pretext that they had "taken part in commerce," when all they had done was sell something of their own making. One peasant was deported on the pretext that his uncle had been a tsarist officer; another was labeled a kulak on account of his "excessive visits to the church." But most often, people were classed as kulaks simply on the grounds that they had resisted collectivization. At times confusion reigned in the dekulakization brigades to an almost comic extreme: in one city in Ukraine, for example, a serednyak who was a member of a dekulakization brigade was himself arrested by a member of another brigade that was operating on the other side of the town. 34

At the top of the list of those branded as kulaks were the clergy. In 1930, more than 13,000 priests were "dekulakized." In many villages and towns, collectivization began symbolically with the closing of the church and the the removal of local religious leaders.35

Collectivization had two major results: famine and exile.

Famine Brought About by Stalin

This Russian child has lost the use of his legs as a result of hunger caused by Stalin's policy of deliberate famine.

Like Lenin before him, Stalin intended to wield collectivization as a weapon against society. By collecting as much grain as he wanted from any section of the country, he subjected any people in those areas to starvation. Because Ukraine resisted Communism, it became the target of collectivization. This region suffered the greatest man-made famine in history, with a total of four million dying of starvation.

How this occurred is significant. First, according to the state's general collectivization policy in 1931, a total of 7.7 million tons of grain was demanded from a Ukrainian harvest which collectivisation had brought down to 18 million tons. This brought the already overburdened villagers almost to the point of starvation and the villagers of Ukraine began to resist Stalin's troops—which made Stalin even more pitiless. In July of 1932, he issued a virtual death order against the whole of the Ukraine by increasing the previous quota demanding another 7.7 million tons of grain to be delivered to the State. Millions of people were condemned to die of starvation. This policy is described in Brian Moynahan's book, The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years:

Requisitioning gangs of Communist activists, armed with steel rods up to ten feet long, swarmed over the Ukraine. 'They searched in the house, in the attic, shed and cellar,' a victim recalled. 'Then they went outside and searched in the barn, pig pen, granary, and straw pile...' Crude watchtowers were put up in the fields, posts with a hut of wood and straw atop them. Here guards armed with shotguns would look out for snippers; those who were driven by hunger to cut off ears of corn with scissors. Those who were caught got a minimum of ten years under the Law of Seven-eighths; some were shot. One Kharkov court issued fifteen hundred death sentences in a month; a woman was given a ten-year sentence for cutting 100 ears of corn from her own plot, two weeks after her husband had died of starvation. The remaining chickens and pigs were eaten in the early winter of 1932. Then the dogs and cats went. 'It was hard to catch them,' wrote Vasily Grossman. 'The animals had become afraid of people and their eyes were wild. People boiled them...

While Russians were dying of hunger, the Communist Party's barns were crammed full. At left, a church used as a storehouse for grain during the implementation of collectivization in the 1930s.

' … Only 4.7 million tons of grain had been delivered by the end of 1932. A new levy was announced. ...Meteorologists were arrested for issuing false weather forecasts to damage the harvest. Veterinarians were shot for sabotaging livestock. Agronomists were accused of being kulaks and deported to Siberia...

Mass starvation started when the snow melted in March 1933. People ate rats, ants, and earthworms. They made soup with dandelions and nettles. The New York Evening Journal correspondent visited a village twenty miles from Kiev. 'In one hut they were cooking a mess that defied analysis,' he wrote. 'There were bones, pigweed, skin, and what looked like a boot top in the pot.'...

People abandoned their villages. They squatted along rail tracks begging for crusts to be thrown from carriage windows, and inundated railroad stations. They followed troops on maneuvers. They crawled about on all fours in towns. Carts went through the streets of Kiev each morning collecting the corpses of those who had died in the night. The children had thin, elongated faces like dead birds...

Still the activists searched for grain; shot mothers who they found digging up potatoes; beat those who were not swollen up in the tell-tale sign of starvation to make them reveal their source of food. 'We were realising Historical Necessity,' wrote the activist Lev Kopolev. 'We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland... I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses—corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov...'

...Word of the famine reached the West… An international relief committee was set up under the archbishop of Vienna. It could do nothing, however, for the Soviet government denied that any famine was taking place.36

Above, a mother and child starving to death. Below, small children who died from the famine. As a result of Stalin's deliberate famine, four million Ukrainians died..

These savage scenes affected the Russian author Michail Sholokhov, who wrote a letter to Stalin demanding an end to this cruelty. But Stalin had done all these things deliberately, of course:

Stalin's Lie...

In April 1933 the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who was passing through the city of Kuban, wrote two letters to Stalin detailing the manner in which the local authorities had tortured all the workers on the collective farm to force them to hand over all their remaining supplies. He demanded that the first secretary send some sort of food aid...

In his reply on 6 May, Stalin made no attempt to feign compassion...In 1933, while these millions were dying of hunger, the Soviet government continued to export grain, shipping 18 million hundredweight of grain abroad "in the interests of industrialization."37

Famine caused the death of six million—men, women, children, old people and infants—not because Soviet farms produced insufficient grain, but because the Communist party wanted this man-made famine to happen. In other words, it was mass murder. Stalin didn't want Western countries to learn of the famine because he feared that any aid campaign would only weaken the punishment he had determined for Ukraine. In the periodical magazine Soviet Studies, historian Dana Dalrymple comments:

The Soviet Union, in fact, has never officially admitted that the famine existed. American and English studies on the USSR occasionally mention a famine in Ukraine but generally provide few or no details. Yet, previous famines in the USSR have been acknowledged by the government and have been well recorded elsewhere. Why the difference? The answer seems to be that the famine of 1932-34, unlike its predecessors was a man-made disaster.38

As a result of collectivization, peasants of Ukraine suffered the greatest losses, with at least four million people dead. In Kazakhstan, one million starved as a result of collectivization. In Northern Caucasus and the Black Earth region, there were a million deaths. With one single order, Stalin had sent six million people to their deaths.39

... And the truth of Stalin

One characteristic of Communism is its reliance on officially produced and disseminated lies. As a result of the famine Stalin fabricated in the Soviet Union, six million died of hunger, and tens of thousands of children were targets of this disaster. This photograph documents the "standard of living" deemed acceptable for Russian children in Stalin's era. But propaganda posters depicted Stalin as a kind, concerned leader receiving gifts of flowers from happy children.

Exiles and Work Camps

Industrial projects in the Soviet Union were carried out by the forced labor of prisoners. This photograph shows Uzbek children among those working under terrible conditions on the construction of the Fergana tunnel.

Stalin murdered millions of others who resisted Communism by sending them into "exile." The Soviet Union singled out many minorities, including Crimean Turks, forcing them from their homes at night and sending them to their deaths, thousands of kilometers away. Those who died on the way numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

In the notes below, written by an instructor of the Party committee in Narym in western Siberia, we see that exile in Russia meant "mass murder":

On 29 and 30 April 1933 two convoys of "outdated elements" were sent to us by train from Moscow and Leningrad. On their arrival in Tomsk they were transferred to barges and unloaded, on 18 May and 26 May, onto the island of Nazino, which is situated at the juncture of the Ob and Nazina rivers. The first convoy contained 5,070 people, and the second 1,044: 6,114 in all. The transport conditions were appalling: the little food that was available was inedible, and the deportees were cramped into nearly airtight spaces… The result was a daily mortality rate of 35-40 people. These living conditions however, proved to be luxurious in comparison to what awaited the deportees on the island of Nazino (from which they were supposed to be sent on in groups to their final destination, the new sectors that are being colonized farther up the Nazina River). The island of Nazino is a totally uninhabited place, devoid of any settlements… There were no tools, no grain, and no food. That is how their new life began. The day after the arrival of the first convoy, on 19 May, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked up. Starving, emaciated from months of insufficient food, without shelter, and without tools, … they were trapped. They weren't even able to light fires to ward off the cold. More and more of them began to die…On the first day, 295 people were buried. It was only on the fourth or fifth day after the convoy's arrival on the island that the authorities sent a bit of flour by boat, really no more than a few pounds per person. Once they had received their meager ration, people ran to the edge of the water and tried to mix some of the flour with water in their hats, their trousers, or their jackets Most of them just tried to eat it straight off, and some of them even choked to death.These tiny amounts of flour were the only food that the deportees received during the entire period of their stay on the island. The more resourceful among them tried to make some rudimentary sort of pancakes, but they had nothing to mix or cook them in… It was not long before the first cases of cannibalism occurred.40

What made Stalin become so merciless was the materialist philosophy he believed in. An unsmiling portrait of Marx hung in the Office where he signed millions of death warrants.

Stanford researcher Robert Conquest's book, The Harvest of Sorrow, has this to say about the exiles of Stalin's time:

Up to 15 and even 20%, especially young children, are reported dying in transit, as was to be the case again in the 1940s, with the mass deportations of minority nationalities. Of course, the deportees were in every sort of physical condition, some of the women pregnant. A Cossack mother gave birth on a deportation train. The baby, as was usual, died. Two soldiers threw the body out while the train was on the move. Sometimes the deportees were taken more or less directly to their final destination. Sometimes, they remained in local towns…

In Archangel all the churches were closed and used as transit prisons, in which many-tiered sleeping platforms were put up. The peasants could not wash, and were covered with sores. They roamed the town begging for help, but there werestrict orders to locals not to help them. Even the dead could not be picked up. The residents, of course, dreaded arrest themselves. In Vologda city too, forty-seven churches were taken over and filled with deportees.41

Another method of mass murder used against exiles were the labor camps. Between the years 1928 and 1953 (when Stalin died), an estimated more than 30 million individuals whose ideas differed from those of the Soviet administration were arrested and sent to gulags, generally established in regions like Siberia where conditions were unlivable. More than two thirds of these—that is, at least 20 million—died in these camps. Inmates living on the edge of starvation were worked between 14 and 16 hours a day, and were executed by camp guards on the least excuse. Some inmates were deliberately starved to death; others died, their physical health broken from lack of nourishment and terrible living conditions. Many others were made to work in light and shredded clothing, froze to death in the Siberian cold. First a prisoner's fingers and toes would freeze and fall off, then his ear or nose would "break off." Hundreds of thousands are known to have suffered and died in this way. In The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, the famous Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gives further examples of this horror.

Stalin's Death Camps

A gulag prison in the Magadan region of Siberia. Here, millions lived and died under ppalling conditions..

These photos show some scenes of Stalin's death camps.Those who showed the least resistance to Communist Party policy were sent to labor camps called gulags, where prisoners were worked to death.

In the Stalinist era, millions of Russian citizens were loaded into trains and taken away.

Red Terror in the Eastern Block

Stalin died in 1953. The terror begun by Lenin, which he had continued and extended, left tens of millions dead and subjected dozens of different ethnic groups to torture and anguish. The Black Book of Communism gives a broad outline of Communist savagery in the Leninist-Stalinist era:

The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial, and the murder of hundreds of thousands or rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 and 1922
The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people
The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920
The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930
The liquidation of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38
The deportation of 2 million kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-1932
The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932-33
The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45
The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941
The wholesale deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1943
The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944
The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 194442

A Message Of Fear To Society :Mass Executions

In Stalin's era, prisoners were sometimes executed in public to send a message of fear to the people. This picture shows opponents of the regime, hanged by the secret police in a public square in 1946.

After Stalin's death, the Soviet regime entered a softer period, limited though it was. But his "reign of fear" continued to govern a society founded on fear. In a later section, we'll examine more closely the fear that held sway in the Soviet Union and all other Communist societies, and how it was organized.

The Soviets did not limit terror to their own people. The outbreak of World War II let the Soviet Union spread throughout Eastern Europe. When the war ended, a number of countries had fallen under Soviet influence. Within a few years, by means of various political plots and maneuvers, Moscow took them all under its hegemony. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and East Germany fell into the clutches of Stalin's bloody legacy.

The red savagery inflicted a hellish life on these countries. Those opposed to the regime were arrested one by one and subjected to torture and execution. In a short time, fear and horror pervaded the whole of society. Long after in the early 1990's, after the fall of Bulgaria's Communist regime, a woman filmed in a Bulgarian documentary describes what happened to her in the autumn of 1944:

The day after my father was first arrested, another policeman arrived around midday and instructed my mother to go to Police Station No. 10 at five o'clock that afternoon. My mother, a beautiful and kind woman, got dressed and left. We, her three children, all waited for her at home. She came back at half past one in the morning, white as a sheet, with her clothes tattered and torn. As soon as she came in, she went to the stove, opened the door, took off all her clothes, and burned them. Then she took a bath, and only then took us in her arms. We went to bed. The next day she made her first suicide attempt, and there were three more after that, and she tried to poison herself twice. She's still alive, I look after her, but she's quite severely mentally ill. I have never found out what they actually did to her.43

Prisoners suffered terribly. The Black Book of Communism describes the torture inflicted by Nicolae Ceausescu's regime in Romania:

Romania was probably the first country in Europe to introduce the methods of brainwashing used by the Communists in Asia. Indeed, these tactics may well have been perfected there before they were used on a massive scale in Asia. The evil goal of the enterprise was to induce prisoners to torture one another. The idea was conceived in the prison in Piteşti. The experiment began in early December 1949 and lasted approximately three years… The goal of the organization was the reeducation of political prisoners, combining study of the texts of Communist dogma with mental and physical torture.44

The purpose of this was to destroy the prisoners' religious faith; at the end of it they were expected to deny the existence of God:

The Securitate, the Romanian secret police, used all the classic methods of torture during their interrogations: beatings, blows to the soles of the feet, hanging people upside down, and so forth. But in the prison built in the 1930's in Piteşti, about 110 kilometers from Bucharest, the cruelty far surpassed those usual methods: The philosopher Virgil Ierunca recalls: "The most vile tortures imaginable were practiced in Piteşti. Prisoners' whole bodies were burned with cigarettes: their buttocks would begin to rot, and their skin fell off, as though they suffered from leprosy. Others were forced to swallow spoonfuls of excrement, and when they threw it back up, they were forced to eat their own vomit.

...According to Virgil Ierunca, reeducation occurred in four phases. The first phase was known as "exterior unmasking." The prisoner had to prove his loyalty by admitting what he had hidden when the case had been brought against him and, in particular, admit his links with his friends on the outside. The second phase was "interior unmasking," when he was forced to denounce the people who had helped him inside the prison. The third phase was "public moral unmasking," when the accused was ordered to curse all the things that he held sacred, including his friends and family, his wife or girlfriend, and his God if he was a believer. In the fourth phase, candidates for joining the OPCB [Organization of Prisoners with Communist Beliefs] had to "reeducate" their own best friend, torturing him with their own hands and thus becoming executioners themselves.

...Eugen Turcanu [head of the OPCB, the purpose of which was the reeducation of political prisoners, combining study of the texts of Communist dogma with mental and physical torture] devised especially diabolical measures to force seminarians to renounce their faith. Some had their heads repeatedly plunged into a bucket of urine and fecal matter, while the guards intoned a parody of the baptismal rite.45

Skulls With Bullet Holes

Stalin's secret police carried out most executions secretly. These skulls, taken from a mass grave in Chelyabinsk, belong to people killed by a bullet in the head by Stalin's secret service (NKVD) You can see the bullet hole in the skull on the right.

People in every country of the Eastern Bloc were subjected to Communism's crazed murderous impulse and passionate hatred of religion. The Darwinist-Materialist philosophy that regards human beings as animals and maintains that constant violence, torture, and fear are needed to subdue these so-called "animals," brought about a terrible regime of torture in Communist prisons.

The Soviet Union brought Communism and brutality to occupied countries of the Eastern Bloc. Every movement against Moscow was repressed with bloody reprisals. After an independence movement sprang up in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968, the Red Army occupied the country. (Above) Soviet tanks in Prague during the occupation in August 1968.

This is why those who regard Darwinism as no danger, or think its theories are harmless, must read this book carefully. The Darwinist-Communist ideology's final aim is to turn people against one another, to alienate them from every moral and spiritual value, thereby bestializing human society into a "herd" that can easily be domesticated and governed. No matter with what ideology they disguise themselves, their aim is all the same, as history has witnessed.

Darkness in Cuba

Cuba's Communist revolution, brought about by the combined efforts of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, is usually presented as a romantic episode in a heroic legend. But Communism brought only misery and torture to Cuba.

During the Cold War period, the Soviet Union supported the dictatorship of Fidel Castro's Cuba, another Communist regime. The guerilla movement led by Castro and supported by the Argentine guerilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara seized power in 1959. Castro protected his regime with political and military support from the Soviet Union, and even when the USSR collapsed, Castro was able to survive.

The Communist movement in Cuba, and in Latin America in general, had an aspect of romanticism. Che Guevara's guerilla movement in particular was portrayed as the "story of a hero." Many young people mounted posters of Che struggling for Communism and sang Latin American Communist songs. Apparently the Cuban revolution was a "freedom struggle" to save people from cruelty and torture under the Cuban dictator Batista.

That was hardly the truth, however. If we look behind the romantic legends of Che and Fidel, we see the dark face of Cuban dictatorship. The Black Book of Communism describes Communist Cuba's labor camps and prisons:

Working conditions were extremely harsh, and prisoners worked almost naked, wearing little more than undergarments. As a punishment, "troublemakers" were forced to cut grass with their teeth or to sit in latrine trenches for hours at a time.

In 1979, the Red Army occupied Afghanistan, putting into effect a brutal policy of genocide that took no account of women and children. Above, a so-called victory march by the Red Army in Moscow in 1984.

The violence of the prison regime affected both political prisoners and common criminals. Violence began with the interrogations conducted by the Departamento Técnico de Investigaciones (DTI). The DTI used solitary confinement and played on the phobias of the detainees: one woman who was afraid of insects was locked in a cell infested with cockroaches. The DTI also used physical violence. Prisoners were forced to climb a staircase wearing shoes filled with lead and were then thrown back down the stairs. Psychological torture was also used, often observed by a medical team. The guards used sodium pentathol and other drugs to keep prisoners awake. In the Mazzora hospital, electric shock treatment was routinely used as a punishment without any form of medical observation. The guards also used attack dogs and mock executions; disciplinary cells had neither water nor electricity; and some detainees were kept in total isolation…

...Visits by relatives provide another opportunity to humiliate prisoners. In La Cabaña prisoners were made to appear naked before their family, and imprisoned husbands were forced to watch intimate body searches carried out on their wives.

Female inmates in Cuban prisons are especially vulnerable to acts of sadism by guards. More than 1,100 women have been sentenced as political prisoners since 1959. In 1963 they were housed in the Guanajay prison. Numerous eyewitness statements attest to beatings and other humiliations. For instance, before showering, detainees were forced to undress in full view of the guards, who then beat them.46

After the 1959 revolution, about ten thousand were executed. More than 30 thousand were imprisoned under the conditions described above. And, just as wherever else a Communist regime was established, it brought pain, torture and fear. Meanwhile, the Cuban people gradually grew impoverished, despite the massive aid from the Soviets.

Soviet Massacres in Afghanistan

To fully examine Marxist-Leninist Bolshevik ideology and its record of savagery, we must also look at the countries invaded by the Soviet Union. Afghanistan was one of those subjected to the greatest cruelty.

In 1978, Communist army generals and some Communist civilians organized a coup in Afghanistan, announced that henceforth, the country would be run by a Communist regime. They also initiated a ruthless war against religion. The Black Book of Communism describes this policy as follows:

Shortly afterward, the government began an antireligious crusade. The Koran was burned in public, and imams and other religious leaders were arrested and killed. On the night of 6 January 1979 all 130 men in the Mojaddedi clan, a leading Shiite group, were massacred. All religious practices were banned...47

Afghanistan Communists were paid by the Soviet Union, inflicting mass murder on their own people according to directives sent by "advisors" from Moscow. After a short time in power, they inflicted great terror. Afghanistan scholar Michael Barry describes one such incident:

In March 1979 …1,700 adults and children, the entire male population of the village [of Kerala], were all assembled in the town square and machine-gunned at point-blank range. The dead and dying were thrown into three mass graves and buried with a bulldozer. For a while afterward, the women could still see the earth move slightly as the wounded struggled to escape, but soon all movement stopped. All the women fled to Pakistan.48

At the same time, terror reigned in Kabul. On the eastern outskirts of the city, the Pol-e-Charki prison became a concentration camp. In The Black Book of Communism, the situation in the prison is described in this way:

As Sayyed Abdullah, the director of the prison, explained to the prisoners: "You're here to be turned into a heap of rubbish." Torture was common; the worst form entailed live burial of prisoners in the latrines. Hundreds of prisoners were killed every night, and the dead and dying were buried by bulldozers. Stalin's method of punishing entire ethnic groups for the actions of some of its members adopted, leading to the arrest on 15 August 1979 of 300 people from the Hazaras ethnic group who were suspected of supporting the resistance. "One hundred fifty of them were buried alive by the bulldozers, and the rest were doused with gasoline and burned alive." In September 1979 the prison authorities admitted that 12,000 prisoners had been eliminated. The director of Pol-e-Charki told anyone who would listen: "We'll leave only 1 million Afghans alive—that's all we need to build socialism."49

All these efforts were directed from Moscow. Indeed, all Afghanistan's inner turmoil was first planned by the Soviets. They had incited the Afghani Communists to make the coup, which they then used as an excuse to invade the country in order to support the so-called "democratic" regime. Most political historians accept that the motive behind Moscow's plan was regarding Islam as a source of danger to the Communists.

On December 27, 1979, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, with the excuse of supporting the Afghani Communist regime against its Muslim "opponents." With this, the savagery inflicted on the Afghani people grew. The Red Army remained as an occupying force in Afghanistan for ten years, during which time it used cruel and pitiless methods in its attempt to destroy opposing groups that rightfully resisted it. One Afghani opponent describes these methods:

The Soviets attacked every single house, looting and raping the women. The barbarism was worse than instinctive, and appeared to have been planned. They knew that in carrying out such acts they were destroying the very foundation of our society.50

Against the Afghani Muslims, the Red Army used the basest methods: They made mines look like toys in order to get Afghani children to play with them, subjected captive opponents to terrible tortures, and bombed civilians without hesitation. The end of their ten-year occupation left tens of thousands of maimed and dead. This is why many Afghani young people are without arms or legs, and why today, Afghanistan is the country that manufactures the most prosthetic limbs. But the Soviets' withdrawal left a power vacuum, and a bloody civil war ensued. In short, the savagery begun in the 1970's at Soviet instigation brought Afghanistan a half century of cruelty and pain.

As mentioned earlier, Communist Russia saw the gradual spread of Islam as a danger and inflicted cruelty to prevent this spread. It forbad Afghanis to worship, burned Qur'ans and murdered those who practiced their Islamic faith. But the invaders did not take into account one important point: Those with no faith at all cannot conceive of a believer's intimate relationship with God. They assume that by destroying holy books, they can make faith disappear too. But faith lies in the heart. Those who truly believe know that all the adversities they suffer are tests from God; therefore, they bear them patiently.

In the Qur'an (2: 155-157), God says to those who believe:

We will test you with a certain amount of fear and hunger and loss of wealth and life and fruits. But give good news to the steadfast: Those who, when disaster strikes them, say, "We belong to God and to Him we will return." Those are the people who will have blessings and mercy from their Lord; they are the ones who are guided. (Qur'an 2: 155-157)

As this verse states, the faithful are tested in many ways in this world, but in every difficulty they turn to God and ask His help. For this reason, no Muslim worries or feels hopeless in the face of the difficulties he encounters. On the contrary, he takes pleasure in the knowledge that God has revealed His promise in the Qur'an and that, in the hereafter, his joy will be overflowing.

The Philosophy behind Communist Savagery: The Bestialization of Human Beings

Communism's Goal: To Bestialize Human Beings

Communists regard human beings as animals that must be controlled and believe that torture, starvation and intimidation are necessary to control the herd. This cruel ideology, an implementation of Darwinism, brought poor workers and peasants only more pain and cruelty than they had known under the Tsars.

The 20th-century Communist lie, proposed by materialist philosophers like Marx and Engels, has been a death machine with an insatiable thirst for blood. Communism has committed terrible crimes, submitting human beings to social pressures, fear, exile, torture, labor camps, famine, and slaughter. But in order not to experience this same savagery again in the future, we must consider its true cause. Is it merely a question of the cruelty and personal ambition of dictators like Lenin and Stalin? Or of the implementation of a Darwinist-based Communist ideology?

As you'll see, the second alternative is the correct one. Savagery is the evident, natural result of the Communist idea that a human being is just another "species." As Marx never tired of pointing out, Communism is based on Darwin's theory of evolution, which describes human beings as advanced animals and which suggests that conflict and struggle among peoples, oppression, cruelty, use of force are natural and legitimate. If someone who accepts this philosophy has enough power and resources, he will find it easy to commit all kinds of cruelty. About this idea, The Black Book of Communism has this to say:

Putting people to death required a certain amount of study. Relatively few people actively desire the death of their fellow human beings, so a method of facilitating this had to be found. The most effective means was the denial of the victim's humanity through a process of dehumanization. As Alain Brossat notes: "The barbarian ritual of the purge, and the idea of the extermination machine in top gear are closely linked in the discourse and practice of persecution to the animalization of the Other, to the reduction of real or imaginary enemies to a zoological state."

Alain Brossat [French philosopher, author] recalls that European shivarees and carnivals had begun a long tradition of the animalization of the other, which resurfaced in the political caricatures of the eighteenth century. This metamorphic rite allowed all sorts of hidden crises and latent conflicts to be expressed. In Moscow in the 1930s, there were no metaphors at all. The animalized adversary really was treated like a prey to be hunted, before being shot in the head. Stalin systemized these methods and was the first to use them on a large scale, and they were adopted by his heirs in Cambodia, China and elsewhere. But Stalin himself did not invent these methods. The blame should probably rest on Lenin's shoulders. After he took power, he often described his enemies as "harmful insects," "lice," "scorpions," and "bloodsuckers."51

As Marx, Engels and Lenin emphasized many times, Communist savagery is nothing more than the implementation of Darwinism's view that humans are merely animals.

Red Army prisoners being treated like caged animals.

According to Stéphane Courtois, research director of The National Scientific Research Center (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-CNRS) in France and an expert in the history of Communism:

In Communism there exists a sociopolitical eugenics, a form of social Darwinism. In the words of Dominic Colas, "As master of the knowledge of the evolution of social species, Lenin decided who should disappear by virtue of having been condemned to the dustbin of history." From the moment that a decision had been made on a "scientific" basis (that is, based in political and historical ideology, as well as in Marxism-Leninism) that the bourgeoisie represented a stage of humanity that had been surpassed, its liquidation as a class and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to it could be justified.52

At the end of his comments, Courtois points out,

The roots of Marxist-Leninism are perhaps not to be found in Marx at all, but in a deviant version of Darwinism, applied to social questions with the same catastrophic results that occur when such ideas are applied to racial issues.53

Certainly it can be related: Communism is definitely rooted in Darwinism—not a "deviant version of Darwinism," but authentic Darwinism. The source of the ideas that humans beings are a species of animal, that history progresses through a natural and inevitable conflict, that no one is responsible for his actions is Charles Darwin. Darwin simply proposed the theory; the Communists implemented it. The bloody account of 20th-century Communism, which presents all the nonsense of dialectical materialism in the guise of "science," is in reality applied Darwinism.

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